This morning, after 30 days of teasing suspense, Yahoo revealed its new logo—the first redesign since the company’s founding 18 years ago. Before-and-after logos via Brand New. The exclamation point is animated on Yahoo.com. Every day for a month prior to the big reveal, Yahoo displayed a diff...

Congratulations—you finally have a name for your company/product/organization. Take a bow, but don’t put away the thesaurus just yet. After the name, the tagline—sometimes called the slogan* (or, if you’re in the UK, the strapline)—is the most visible language in your verbal brand. And yet tagli...

It's interesting: I recently saw one of the latest VZW spots featuring Susie, and while I thought the commercial was well done (although to be honest, had you asked me at the top of your article what company sponsored it, I'd have been flummoxed), something didn't feel quite right to me. I am pretty sure you nailed my discomfiture.
I'm of an age to remember when Susie (and Suzy and Susan and Sue) were popular names. I now have two granddaughters, whose names are Alison and Virginia (named for her paternal great-grandmother). I visit them often enough to be familiar with the elder's friends' names—and I've never heard of a Susan.

During a recent evening of TV viewing I saw repeated airings of “Going Pink,” the latest installment in Verizon Wireless’s long-running “Susie’s Lemonade” ad campaign. The ads, created by McCann Erickson, feature a plucky, adorable girl, age 8 or 9, who over the course of the campaign turns a co...

Let’s set aside, for a moment, our puzzlement about why the world needs “gourmet” scented pencils. Let’s instead ask why, in the name of Lewis Carroll*, someone thought it was clever to name those pencils Smencils. It’s the product name and the company name! They’re both bad. We get it: smel...

Psst . . . Nancy, paragraph three: "there"?
On point, I wondered if the tagline might be an attempt at a haiku tag, but too many syllables, and Thailand.
And, the nonidiomatic phrasing is probably one that you'll remember. (Contrasted with a tagline that might have ended in *gasp* a preposition?)

The intent is clear enough—the bubbly hearts drive it home—but the English is, to put it charitably, unidiomatic. Sunlee outdoor ad, Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. It’s the sort of awkward phrasing you might expect to find on the Engrish website or in one of linguist Victor Mair’s “lost i...